Energy and work have a complicated relationship. When we’re firing on all cylinders, we’re burning energy but creating it too—with no net waste in a productive cycle. But sustaining a focused hum also requires giving your mind a break and letting it drift for a few precious minutes or hours. Concentration can be recharged by allowing yourself to get lost in a different rhythm.

Close your eyes to pick out the sounds or smells: how composer John Cage found the music in New York City, how you can catch a whiff of perfume or of the clean from someone’s morning shower. You also let the wave float you back to shore by opening your eyes really wide and drinking in the natural world.

My neighbor, Leigh Marsh, has been a veterinarian for almost 60 years, still working until ten or eleven most nights, although a concession of sorts is his setting out a bit later than he used to most mornings. Leigh’s veterinary practice began in a prosperous part of town, and stayed when all the money got up and went. He’s there for the dogs, cats and people who keep them, and thrives on the community that he helps to preserve. Whenever I ask Leigh “How are you?” he says: “Great, as long as I can keep working.”

He wouldn’t call it hard work, but it is.

He’d tell you he doesn’t have a secret, but he does.

I was in my front yard yesterday when I noticed Leigh and Jane (his daughter in for a visit) scanning the ribbon of grass between the street and the sidewalk in front of his house. They walked back & forth, fully engaged, with heads bowed. Maybe a lost earring, I thought. They went inside eventually, but Leigh was out again soon, scouring that strip of ground. “Do you need another pair of eyes?” I called, walking over. Barely looking up he said: “There are four and even five and six-leaf clovers here,” giving those he’d already found a quick wave to demonstrate the truth of it. “And this here is a particularly good patch.”

LEIGH MARSH DVM

Psychologists have known for over a century that there are two kinds of attention: the directed attention we use when we’re concentrating, and the involuntary attention that requires no mental effort at all. A recent article in the Atlantic traces the distinction to William James, who said it is “[s]trange things, moving things, wild animals, bright things, pretty things, words, blows, blood, etc., etc., etc.” that attract our attention involuntarily.

It’s attraction that comes with a slew of salutary benefits.

In a recent study, portable EKGs traced the brainwaves of people walking in heavily trafficked urban areas, in parks and in the spaces in-between to see if there were discernible differences. In an interview after the study, lead researcher Jenny Roe noted that the walkers became “mentally quieter” in more natural places. “Natural environments still engage” the brain, she said, but the attention demanded “is effortless.” Environments like these “hold our attention while at the same time allowing scope for reflection.” They elevate our abilities to sense and to wander while putting our minds at ease.

Of course, psychologists also couldn’t resist naming “the replenishing part” of involuntary attention. According to Adam Alter in the Atlantic piece, they gave it the appropriately poetic acronym ART, for attention restoration theory. Here it is in a nutshell:

[U]rban environments are draining because they force us to direct our attention to specific tasks (e.g., avoiding the onslaught of traffic) and grab our attention dynamically, compelling us to “look here!” before telling us to instead “look over there!” These demands are draining — and they’re also absent in natural environments. Forests, streams, rivers, lakes, and oceans demand very little from us, though they’re still engaging, ever changing, and attention-grabbing. The difference between natural and urban landscapes is how they command our attention. While man-made landscapes bombard us with stimulation, their natural counterparts give us the chance to think as much or as little as we’d like, and the opportunity to replenish exhausted mental resources.

In this, the man-made, urban environment is synonymous with the workplace.

Getting lost in nature for a few moments relieves the workplace stresses too. The harder we work the more we need to get lost in it, and all the other strange and moving, bright and pretty things that can take us away for awhile and return us to the tasks at hand refreshed.

We are collecting more data about our products, services and the reactions to them than ever. But how good are we at understanding what this information is saying? Who is interpreting it all? What training, what habits of mind do you need to “make the data speak” so that you and others can understand and learn something from it? Who is responsible for finding that meaning?

In their new book called Big Data, Victor Mayer-Schonberger and Kenneth Cukier argue that we no longer need to find the underlying motivations that were once suggested by limited information. Today, we can do almost all of our interpreting by looking at the vast reams of data themselves. In marketing, for example, this glut is removing the need to delve into customer psychology or analyze social pressures to understand why people are buying our product or service, or declining to do so.

In a big-data world…we won’t have to be fixated on causality; instead we can discover patterns and correlations in the data that offer us novel and invaluable insights…[D]ata is about what, not why.

While the question does seem to be changing from “why” to “what,” there is no question that human beings remain at the nexus between the data and its meaning. As Cukier noted in a recent interview:

[I]t’s really important that you take in as much information and come up, using your judgment and wisdom … come up with a decision based on that.

In the final half hours before sleep, I’ve been breezing my way through the collected works of popular writer David Baldacci. All of them offer a dark perspective on the American intelligence establishment, with orphaned teenagers, fringe types and odd couples pulling us back from the catastrophic edge. In other words: his storytelling is perfect for my final moments of consciousness after a long day. I’m currently on my way to the final battle of good versus evil in The Sixth Man: a titanic chess match involving a pawn called “the Analyst.”

All of the pre-processed and un-processed information from surveillance satellites, spies, informants, governmental and non-governmental agencies, security cameras at sensitive facilities—you get the idea—an unimaginable glut of information everyday, flashes across a single screen in a secret government facility. The Analyst sits in front of it, making connections and gathering meanings that elude individuals with much less information, on the one hand, or that any computer can crunch, on the other. His mind is wired to retain everything he’s ever seen and to find resonances within this vast trove of information to enable the defense establishment to protect America. His is a god-like role.

In a tough jobs climate for graduates (indeed for all workers) over the past 5 years, a lot of aspersion has been cast at the value of a liberal arts education. In essence, if you can’t make money from it, why study it? That’s where the lessons of an idea book and a work of popular fiction come in.

As I’ve said before, there is a quality of mind that is nurtured in English and History and Philosophy departments that is aimed at finding the meaning in our books, our past and our ideas. This may be today’s single most valuable skill. With our machines giving us more to chew on, we need the men and women who can tell us what the patterns and associations buried within all the information means.

Every company in America, from the smallest mom & pop to the global behemoth needs this capability. They all need workers who can dip into the information pool to pull out the expected and unexpected connections, and enable their products and services to meet real needs, deepening the value of their customer, supplier and community relationships.

As a worker in this knowledge economy, just as you needed to learn how to use a library at school, there are data gathering and analytics tools to master first. But once you do, there is something of the godlike Analyst waiting to step to the fore in every humanities major.

I’m thinking today about how quickly our lives seem to be moving thanks to all our devices, how much we’re adapting to this acceleration, and whether pulling ourselves onto the fast lane over and over again is a such a good thing.

Every day my internal clock collides with the digital clock that never sleeps. It’s like those days barreling down the entry ramp onto the highway with my poor Corolla struggling to accelerate fast enough. I always manage to inject myself into the stream of on-line traffic—but some days, just barely. It’s the torrent of email, video clips, photos, tweets, commentary, the latest news from North Korea. The speed and magnitude of incoming data is different than it was just a few years ago. What’s happening when we try to adjust to its demands?

We know from Daniel Coyle that your brain puts down tracks as you learn something for the first time through regular practice. The mastery of new tasks involves building new neurological highways with an “asphalt” in you brain called myelin. So when you are striving to get in sync with that digital clock day after day, where exactly are you headed? What are you becoming, what am I becoming with this new kind of machine-enhanced capability?

In terms of adaptation, researchers have just discovered microbes that have figured out how to live in a daunting environment called “the Challenger Deep.” It is the deepest part of the Mariana Trench, 6.8 miles below sea level, where all the biomaterials that haven’t already been consumed by the ocean of sea creatures above them eventually come to rest as food. It may have taken them millennia to adapt, but these feeding microbial creatures have shattered our presumptions about the temperatures, pressures, amount of light, and other factors that are necessary to sustain life.

Other deep dives have found jellyfish and tubeworms that have learned how to survive near underwater chimneys that boil the surrounding water to 635 degrees Fahrenheit. There is an unnerving sense that we too are beginning to adapt to the harsh environment of on-line all the time. The question is: at what cost?

In a recent article discussing his new book Present Shock, Douglas Rushkoff argues that we need to do a far better job of protecting ourselves as we jump between biological and digital time. Each of us already inhabits a body with intricate timing mechanisms that balance and adjust the rhythms of everyday life.

The body is based on hundreds, perhaps thousands, of different clocks, syncing to everything from the sun and moon to levels of violence and available water.

We can’t override the human clocks that maintain our equilibrium with the demands of today’s digital machine time without paying a price, but this is exactly what we are attempting to do.

[T]oo many of us aspire to be ‘on’ at any time and to treat the various portions of the day as mere artifacts of a more primitive culture—the way we look at seemingly archaic blue laws requiring stores to close at least one day a week. We want all access, all the time, to everything—and to match this intensity and availability ourselves: citizens of the virtual city that never sleeps.

Among other things, Rushkoff recommends that you “reclaim” your time, by making your digital devices serve your most basic human needs and not just struggle to keep up with them.

You usually need to know something’s wrong before you do something about it. Given the slow but steady acceleration of the digital onslaught in recent years, we are a bit like that frog in water that is gradually being brought to a boil and doesn’t know he’s cooked until it’s too late.

Of course our machines need to be tamed, even shut off now and then, so that it’s clear who’s in charge. On the other hand, it’s also true that every new use of technology tends to herald our next form.

I like a newspaper I can hold in my hands because sometimes the stories across the folds can talk to one another in ways that never seems to happen on a screen. That kind of exchange took place in my newspaper today.

For as long as I’ve been reading it, the Wall Street Journal has a funny, odd or just plain ridiculous story at the bottom of Page One. At some point, the Page One editor must have decided that stories like this are good antidotes to the calamities, logjams and shenanigans chronicled above. These daily stories always froth over to the last page of the “news” where they brush up against the beginnings of the “commentary” section on the other side of fold. It’s here that strangely compatible bedfellows sometimes meet.

Page One’s dollop of the day today was about a long-standing West Point tradition celebrating the graduating cadet, who by academic and other standards, finishes dead last in his class each year. Because of some “informal” information sharing, everyone but The Goat knows who he is on the big day, and when his name is called out from the graduating roster, the cadets erupt into the loudest cheer of the day.

There are two kinds of Goats, according to a disappointingly dry piece in a publication called Failure Magazine. There are cadets who labor through the muck to the bitter end, and those who take the experience just seriously enough to fall inebriatedly over the finish line. Of course, several of the Good Time Goats were actually pretty smart and went on to make history (Generals Custer and Pickett, for example). Several middling cadets did pretty well too. (Eisenhower reportedly said: “If anybody saw signs of greatness in me while at West Point they kept it to themselves.”) But it’s the ones who always struggled to do their best, while barely making it to the end, who are the real heroes of the story.

Unclear whether to be embarrassed or proud of their accomplishment, most of these Goats eventually seem to settle into being good sports about it. For example: “In my class, no one else can say that they’re the Goat and no one else can say that they’re part of this special lineage that dates back so far,” said good sport Roberto Becarra, Jr. in 2007. Somewhat earlier, the bespeckled Goat (below) seems to have had a similar reaction.

EVEN THOUGH IT’S NAVY NOT ARMY, THIS IMAGE SEEMS ODDLY APPROPRIATE HERE

When asked about these persevering Goats by the Journal reporter, James S. Robbins said:

The tradition of the Goat is important because it kind of encapsulates that American spirit of—yeah, you’re going to have the top and they’re going to get recognized and they’re going to get stars by their names and all that other stuff. But, you know what? The guys further down, they have their chance too, and they can succeed too and it’s important to recognize them.

While his insight might have been more penetrating had he been a psychologist or meteorologist instead of an historian, Robbins’ remarks did manage to counterpoint similar observations about the value of “keeping your head up” and “putting one foot in front of the other” on the facing page of the paper, where a Journal writer reviews a new book by Nassim Nicholas Taleb called Antifragile.

Taleb’s singular perspective is that theories follow practice instead of the reverse. It’s not “the Soviet/Harvard notion that birds fly because we lecture them how to.” We learn by doing it first, and make up the theories that contain all of our how-to-do-it wisdom later on. It is, as the reviewer notes, “a startling [chicken v. egg] insight,” because what Taleb’s debunking allows is a flat-out celebration of the creativity involved in doggedly keeping at it. The many virtues of trial and error.

Taleb makes up the word “antifragile” to mean not only hardy, but also something that has been improved through repeated failures, becoming more resilient in the process. From this perspective, the persevering Goats are not just plodders: more than a few of them embody the adaptation that is at the beating heart of natural selection. As Taleb’s reviewer notes:

If trial and error is creative, then we should treat failed entrepreneurs with the reverence that we reserve for fallen soldiers.

This is why experience is the best teacher. It’s why “A” students who master the theory often work for the “B” and “C” students who rightly suspect that the magic lies elsewhere. It’s why rigidity and too much seriousness is always a bad idea. And it’s why the loudest cheer really should go to somebody who has not only failed most prominently, but also has the spirit to get up and keep trying.

There was a story in the Times this week about a policeman who came upon a barefoot man lying outside on a cold night and bought him a pair of boots. I know about this for several reasons including multiple, near-simultaneous postings of the story on my Facebook page, and because several additional friends and family members sent it to me.

There’s no question that what happened here embodies acting on your values through your work. It was heartening that so many people I know were touched by the story. It was also noteworthy for its rarity.

Not that these things don’t happen all the time (they do) but because most Good Samaritans (in my experience anyway) prefer not to be noticed, and they usually get away with it because there’s not a tourist with a camera eager to capture their kind act (as there was here). What happened between the New York City cop and the homeless man was a rarity because we got a chance to see it—and millions of us looked. (You can read the Times story and see the now famous picture here).

My question is: how many of the millions who thought this story was “wonderful” actually learned something from Officer DePrimo? About what he did and we could do too. Or about his modesty (since I don’t think it’s a coincidence that we’ve never seen his face).

A recent study by Japanese researchers suggests that looking at pictures of kittens and puppies relaxes us and improves our concentration for other things later on. Was this tourist snapshot more or less like that: a post-card to share with friends so that they could have some of the warm and fuzzy that we’re enjoying too?

ARE YOU FEELING IT?

During this season of giving, it seems worth asking: What was the conversion rate on this Good Samaritan advertisement?